Trajectories of Search - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 145

Fig. 4.2 Knowledge garden

Fig. 4.3 A scene in StarWalker when two users exploring the semantically organized virtual space

4.1.2 Searching in Virtual Worlds

In Knowledge Garden (Crossley et al. 1999 ), a knowledge management system
developed at BT Laboratory in the UK, documents are visualized as plants in a
garden (See Fig. 4.2 ). Although users' trails are not directly visible, when a branch
starts to move back and forth, it means that someone else is reading that document.
Figure 4.3 is a screenshot of StarWalker when two users were exploring the
semantically organized virtual space (Chen 1999a ). Figure 4.4 shows more users
are gathering in the scene.
Figure 4.5 is a map of a website produced by see POWER showing the layout
of an entire web site, with the colored contours representing the number of hits an